Leave it to a legendary Binghamton pub and grill to create a new holiday for the city.
The Belmar is doing just that Sept. 1 with the first annual “Thirty-three Cecils Day,” a celebration of life, Binghamton and the acclaimed novel and future motion picture of the same name.
The Main Street pub is a key plot location in “Thirty-three Cecils,” Everett De Morier’s London Book Festival fiction prize winner set in 1990s-era Binghamton and Erie, Pa.
De Morier is a former Binghamton resident.
“Thirty-three Cecils” was published by Blydyn Square Books in 2015. It unfolds through a series of fortuitously discovered journal entries by two murdered men: a prominent cartoonist/documentarian from Erie who goes to prison for forgery, and a hard-drinking Broome County landfill employee who quits his job and sets off on a life-altering bicycle journey.
While “Thirty-three Cecils” is on many high school and university reading lists and is currently being developed as a major motion picture by Sunset River Productions of Los Angeles (with extensive filming slated to take place in Binghamton and Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman reportedly attached), it was one reader’s love of the novel that led to the new holiday.
More:Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman tied to Binghamton film ‘Thirty-Three Cecils’
A man walks into the Belmar … How new holiday was created
Mike Pedley visited the Belmar Pub in Binghamton for the first time on Sept. 1, 2022. Pedley had waited to stop by until that day because it is the date when the main characters in his favorite novel, “Thirty-three Cecils,” are slain. Dutch, the landfill worker, frequents the Belmar early on in the story.
Pedley ordered a beer and started chatting with the bar patrons about the book.
“I know it’s a novel,” Pedley said to Jennifer James, the Belmar manager. “But it always seemed real to me.”
Pedley’s enthusiasm turned out to be contagious. James took a photo of Pedley and sent it to De Morier, who…
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